He therefore must keep his labor forces about the mine. For that purpose the work is apportioned among all miners on the operator's pay-roll, each being allowed as many days in any week as needed to fill the operator's orders. The effects of the industrial depression of 1907-1908 were met in a similar way in the clothing industry of Baltimore, where the hours of work each day were shortened, but few, if any, of the employees were thrown out of work. "Labor unions sometimes demand that part time be worked with a full force instead of discharging a portion of the force and operating full time."2 A few labor organizations here and in Europe have established unemployed benefits.

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Great Britain has entered upon the plan to nationalize the business of the labor agent. The State of Wisconsin is since 1911 engaged in a similar experiment. The United States Government, yielding to the popular notion that immigrants ought to be encouraged to take up farm work, is trying in a modest way to facilitate the distribution of immigrants to agricultural sections. It is characteristic of the unprogressive spirit of American trade-unionism that instead of urging broader legislation which would deal effectively with the whole problem of unemployment, organized labor has opposed on principle the first step of the government in this direction. For fear lest the diffusion of information regarding opportunities of employment might lead to a mad rush of uncounted hordes of hungry fortune seekers to this new El Dorado, organized labor prefers to leave the distribution of labor in the hands of padroni and employment agents.

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Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. II, p. 417.

Frank Tracy Carlton: The History and Problems of Organized Labor, pp. 443-444.

CHAPTER VII

RACIAL STRATIFICATION

NDUSTRIAL evolution has broken down the stable or

ganization of ancient and mediæval societies, in which every individual had a fixed place and the son followed the occupation of the father. Modern industrial society tends to revert to the nomadic type. People come and go, and others settle in the places. There were, in 1900, /thirteen and a half million persons born in the United States who were living outside of their native States. There is no record of migration within State limits. Assuming that the number of native citizens migrating within their State of birth is equal to the number migrating to contiguous States, six millions more may be added to the migratory population, making in all about 30 per cent of the total native population. Yet when it is learned that of the 2,653,000 native Missourians who were living in the United States, 618,000 resided outside of their native State, while 855,000 natives of other States settled in Missouri, 2 no one takes it that the Missourians were "displaced" by the "invasion" of a host nearly a million strong from Southern and Eastern States. It is only when the new-comers are of foreign birth that the impression of "racial displacement" is created.

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There was one great racial displacement in America: the Indian was displaced from his land by the European in. vasion. The invasion and the displacement in that instance 1 XII. Census, Supplementary Analysis, p. 281,

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were physical acts, not metaphors. When the term "racial displacement" is applied to immigration, it suggests the idea of a virtual crowding out of the native American by the alien invader. No doubt, in the shifting of population from East to West, from country to city, the racial composition of many settlements has changed. Within the memory of the present generation the Irish and German colonies of New York City gradually moved out of the sections they had occupied in the 80's and early 90's of the past century and in their places Jewish and Italian colonies grew up. Still the old Irish or German settler of ten or twenty years ago can be located in another section of the great city, and the public is conscious of the fact that he has simply moved from one neighborhood to another which seemed to him more attractive. The population of New York City, however, is large enough to fill several States. Were the same population spread over a hundred cities of about forty thousand inhabitants each and had the German residents of one city gradually moved out of it to others within a radius of twenty-five miles, their places being filled by a new race, the change would be keenly felt by many.. The grocer, the butcher, the hotelkeeper, the physician, the lawyer, would be losing patronage. In their minds the change would be reflected as the "displacement" of the old

The definition of the word "displacement" given by the Oxford English Dictionary is as follows:

Displacement: The act of displacing or fact of being displaced. Removal of a thing by substitution of something else in its place.-1880, Library Universal Knowledge: "The displacement of human labor through machinery."

Hydrostatics: The displacing of a liquid by a body immersed in or floating on it.

Displace:

I. To remove or shift from its place; to put out of the usual place. 2. To remove from a position, dignity, or office.

3. To oust (something) from its place and occupy it instead. . . . (b) to take the place of, supplant, replace.— A. R. Wallace, Darwinism"; "This weed . . . absolutely displaced every other plant on the ground."

settlers by the new-comers. And yet the element of crowding out, even in a metaphorical sense, might be wholly absent. The abandonment of the New England farms may serve as an illustration. No one "displaced" the New England farmer; the population of many a town fell off, but few new settlers, native or foreign-born, came to take the places of those who had gone. The old homesteads were left to decay and their proprietors went West, where they found better opportunities. And now we witness the same movement in Iowa, whose population has decreased since. 1900, the farmers being attracted by cheaper lands in Western Canada.

Is it not possible that a similar process has been going on in manufacturing, in mining, in railroading? Where there was a wilderness thirty years ago, several new States with a substantial population have grown up. The railroads of the West needed employees, who had to come from the East. From 1879 to 1909, the manufactures of New England and the Middle Atlantic States added one and a half million wage-earners to their personnel, whereas the industrial development of the rest of the country created opportunities for two and one third million new hands, as shown in Table 25 next below. The manufactures in the West and South grew much faster than in the East and drew some of the native workers and earlier immigrants from the older manufacturing States. Still the demand for labor in those States also grew. The places left vacant by the old employees who had gone westward had to be filled by new immigrants. The term "displacement" would be misapplied to such a migration of wage-earners, as much as in the case of the migration of the New England farmer.

Let us see what light can be thrown upon this question by the statistics of occupations. The results of the census of 1910 have as yet not been published. According to the latest available figures covering the whole area of the United States, the economic stratification within the principal

elements of the white population in 1900 exhibited very characteristic differences, as appears from Table 26.

TABLE 25.

AVERAGE NUMBER OF WAGE-EARNERS EMPLOYED IN MANUFACTURES (THOUSANDS), 1879-1909.1

PER CENT DISTRIBUTION OF MALE BREADWINNERS 21 YEARS OF AGE AND OVER, BY NATIVITY AND CLASS OF OCCUPATIONS, 1900.*

The majority of Americans of native parentage, in 1900, were engaged in farming, in business, in the professions, and in all sorts of commercial and clerical pursuits. The majority of the immigrants, on the other hand, were industrial wage-earners. 4

The question is, was this adjustment of native and foreign elements on the scale of occupations attended by actual “racial displacement"? Comparing the numbers

1XII. Census, vol. vii., pp. clxxii-clxxiii.—Manufactures: United States. XIII. Census Bulletin, p. 19.

Isaac A. Hourwich, "The Social-Economic Classes of the Population of the United States." The Journal of Political Economy, April, 1911, p. 327. * Including farming.

• Speaking of the immigrants in a "representative" coal-mining community (Shenandoah, Pa.), the Immigration Commission states